St George and St Gabriel, Stockport

This week is Refugee Week. A week that celebrates the contribution, creativity and resilience of refugees and people seeking asylum.

A few months ago Jan and I went to a reading at Simply Books in Bramhall given by the poet Brian Tilston.  We bought a copy of his book “Days Like These – An alternative guide to the year in 366 poems”.  Brian’s writing can be funny, witty and serious.  This is his poem for 20 June.  I reproduce it here in full –  without his permission.  I hope that he will forgive me.

Refugees

They have no need of our help

So do not tell me

These haggard faces could belong to you or me

Should life have dealt a different hand

We need to see them for who they are

Chancers and scroungers

Layabouts and loungers

With bombs up their sleeves

Cut-throats and thieves

They are not

Welcome here

We should make them

Go back to where they came from

They cannot

Share our food

Share our homes

Share our countries

Instead let us

Build a wall to keep them out

It is not okay to say

These are people just like us

A place should only belong to those who are born there

Do not be so stupid to think that

The world can be looked at another way

(now read this poem backwards)

I didn’t know who Joan Chittister was, though clearly she was a nun because she had the initials OSB – Order of St. Benedict – after her name.  I was reading a piece she had written.  It was the passage for the day in a little book called Peacemaking*.  And I was challenged by it.

“ Everyday people that are church-educated go quietly and serenely to factories where they assemble warheads, to laboratories where they increase the megaton capacity of our arsenals, to boardrooms where they vote to increase our ‘defence’ capabilities, to churches where they pray the ‘Our Father’ without discomfort.”

She was writing at a time when the nuclear threat was seen as the biggest threat.  CND – the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – was very prominent with ban the bomb marches and demonstrations. Joan goes on to re-iterate that it is the Church’s role to pray for peace, to be receptive to God’s response to us.  But not to expect God to “save us from our own insane sinfulness”.

And, yes, churches should be centres where “strangers can become sisters and brothers in Christ.”  But as churches and individuals we should be more than this.  We should be “models of disobedience”, adopting what the psychologist Eric Fromm calls a “revolutionary personality”.  To become “a person who is independent, who has the capacity to identify deeply with humanity and who has the ability to disobey in the interest of more fundamental values”.

What a challenge.  But, as she suggests,  “the Prophets, Jesus and the early Christians would have understood this role completely”.

*Peacemaking – Day by Day Daily Readings, Pax Christi, Christian Peace Education Centre

Chris Dawson 

We live by associations and connections.  One of the ways of staying connected to loved ones, particularly if they have died or are absent from our day to day lives, is through pictures and objects connected with them. 

On our piano are photographs of our children and grandchildren.  Many of them capture them frozen in a moment of time in a school photograph.   A glance at them evokes happy thoughts and memories and uplifts the spirit.  

Yet, in a way such photographs are out of date.  The children, like us, have moved on.  Yes, it’s good to enjoy a smile and bathe in the warmth of past associations and loving connections.  Objects from the past – photographs, pictures, furniture, books and so on – all have their associations.  And we can become very attached to them.

Back in the 1950s my Uncle Ewart and his business partner Billy Maiden, had a very successful garage and haulage company in the Midlands.  They did well and were able to live very comfortably.  Billy had been brought up in a small, back street terrace.  After his parents’ death, he and his family were clearing the house and they fell out over it.  All over who should inherit the kitchen table and chairs.  A few sticks of furniture, as my Grandfather called them. 

Sometimes we are not able to let go, to move on.  Sometimes we forget that we are “passing through” and, as Ram Dass says, “Just walking each other home.”

At Evensong we sing the two canticles, known in Latin as the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis,.  After singing them a couple of weeks back, it struck me how full of thankfulness they both are.  From different perspectives both Mary and Simeon are grateful to God for the coming of Jesus and all that it promises.

The Roman writer Cicero says, “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others”.  When I came across this quotation, it set me thinking.  Do I agree that all other positive behaviours and attitudes stem from our approaching life with gratitude?  Probably only trying to put it into practice would give me an answer.

Certainly, it is salutary to stop and notice  what my attitude is, what I am focused on and how I am feeling. All too often it is life’s frustrations and stresses  that are taking my attention and I make little room for gratitude.

I soon realised that what we focus on expands.  I read that when we focus a little longer on a positive experience, it forms a positive pathway in the brain.  If in a spirit of gratitude we pause and notice that flower, listen to that bird song, or say “thank you” for the efforts that others have made, we are building a bank of uplifting experiences we can draw on.

We all need such a bank.  Life is not always rosy.  A spirit of gratitude can help us to lift our spirits and navigate those challenges.

Chris Dawson

Walk past St George’s, or any school playground, at break or lunch time and what will you see?  Movement.  Lots of it as children run and dodge round the playground.  Chasing, shouting, laughing.  The human brain grows in response to movement. 

We’re happy with this kind of movement.  Happy, joyful, youthful movement. But movement also means that things in life shift and change.  And some things we’d like to keep the same.  We’re not keen on this idea of impermanence. It undermines our sense of stability.

Outside our window stands a rowan tree, a Mountain Ash.  It is always the first tree to come into leaf.  A short time ago the tips of its branches burst into frothy flat sprays of creamy flowers and already they have become brown and are turning into the pinpoints that will swell into berries.  This tree will also be the first to lose its leaves when Autumn comes.

There’s a rhythm here.  A rhythm of growth and renewal.  Without impermanence we would be stuck.  We would have no opportunity to change, to develop, to let go and embrace a new way of being.

The church moves on too, from season to season. We move on this week from celebrating Easter to the Ascension.  Yes, it all moves in the blink of an eye.  But we can be still for a moment, reflect and carry with us something learned from each season.  And in that way we can grow.

Chris Dawson  

Just over a month ago Jan, my wife, and I went down to a concert at the Royal Albert Hall.  Jan had quietly searched the internet and booked the tickets two years before, after I had missed the same concert in Manchester.  I’d mentioned that this piece of music was one I’d really like to hear in my lifetime.

Mahler’s second symphony, known as The Resurrection, requires huge resources – 120 orchestral players, two soloists and over a hundred in the choir that joins the orchestra in the last movement.  A movement that grows and grows towards an Apocalyptic climax, only to drop into a sublime stillness.

“So you have ticked off one of the items on your bucket list”, said a friend.   I do make lists of jobs and tick them off as I go – with a schoolteacher’s red pen!  But I realised that I don’t have a bucket list. Should I start one?  I found that I didn’t have any enthusiasm for making one.  In fact it felt a bit stressful to even contemplate it.  Another job to do.

We can always be looking forward, always striving.  Ticking things off.  Only to find something else to add to the list.  Where would my bucket list end and would I ever complete it?  Buddhists talk of “aimlessness”.  We tend to be disparaging about people who are aimless.  “Aimlessness” is the antidote to striving.

That accords with Mahler’s vision of the sublime stillness that ends his symphony. One in which, “Just an overwhelming love illuminates our being.  We know, and are.”

Chris Dawson

I was waiting to turn right into the road leading down to the back of Stockport station, when I saw it.  A large advertising hoarding advertising Amazon Prime, with the words “Endless entertainment”.  Heaven or hell?

I had decided to watch a drawing programme on Channel 4.  I switched the television on and selected the channel.  A notice came up saying that it wasn’t available.  I sat and waited for a bit, a little impatient.  Suddenly there was activity.  Then I realised, Channel 4 is not 24 hour entertainment.  It doesn’t begin until 7.0pm and this was the first programme of the evening.

We are often not comfortable with waiting.  Having an empty space. Nothing to do.  With just being.  Perhaps even for a moment. Maybe it’s because, in that space, we come up against ourselves and that is not always comfortable.  We are tempted to fill these empty spaces with activity, with sounds, with distraction, with entertainment.

Distraction can be helpful for a bit.  We all need “time out” to relax from the pressures of life.  Hopefully, once entertained we feel able to return to our world refreshed, ready to be with ourselves and with things as they are.

Empty spaces can play their part too.  They can be creative. Emptiness is not a vacuum.  A space is full of potential.  After all, our faith is built on the potential of an empty tomb.

Chris Dawson

Paying taxes doesn’t have a very good press.  We tend to see them as something negative.  Something imposed upon us.  A necessary evil.  Something over which we don’t have much say.  Perhaps it’s no wonder, given their history.

In England,  Henry VIII put a tax on beards.  In 1696 William III – William of Orange – introduced the window tax.  The more windows you had the more you paid.  So people bricked them up and built houses with less windows.  At the height of Empire, the British prohibited Indians from trading in salt, monopolised the salt trade and, to add insult to injury, put a heavy sales tax on to the price of it.

Yes taxes can be ridiculous, inconvenient, unfair and abusive.  But could we begin to see them differently?  To see them as a contribution to the Common Good?  Church Action for Tax Justice thinks so.  They suggest that paying fairly based taxes is a way of showing love for our neighbour, care for creation and a way of creating the type of society we find in the teachings of Jesus and the prophets.

The Scribes and Pharisees were trying to trick him.  They handed Jesus a coin with Caesar’s head on it.  Should we pay taxes to the Romans?   His response? “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”  And he went on “eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners”.

Chris Dawson

Holy Week is like walking the labyrinth, the story always moving forward, yet doing so with twists and turns.  Going back on itself, but inexorably moving towards the centre, towards a climax.  You might say a revelation.

The stories of Holy Week and Easter are so familiar.  We know the characters. We know the actions.  We know what is going to happen.  But can we gain new insights – into the story and into ourselves?  

Walking the labyrinth with an open mind, moving steadily step by step, even as we twist and turn and pause for a moment, encourages reflection.  It gets us in touch with ourselves and opens us up to possibilities.  It takes us away from the familiar to a deeper understanding. 

Betrayal is a major theme of the Holy week stories.  By the Wednesday of Holy Week (known by the Irish as Spy Wednesday) Judas, the anti-hero of the drama, has featured in three, if not four of the Gospel readings since Palm Sunday.  It is easy to demonise the betrayer.  But what if we were able to walk with Judas and see something of ourselves in him? 

The Eastern Church calls today “Great and Holy Wednesday”.  For them, out of the clash between the extreme opposites of love and betrayal something wonderful and beautiful emerges, because Jesus looks Judas straight in the eye and allows things to unfold.

Chris Dawson

They came this morning in a big, open lorry – tools and barrows in the back – to clear next door’s wilderness.  Their task was to create a new turfed garden in two days.  To cut back all the intertwined growth that had sprung up since the space was last lived in and tended.

They put on protective gloves, goggles and ear muffs, pulled the cord and the machines were off, cutting and strimming.  The machines dictated the rhythm.  It was all speed, strain and smoke.  The chainsaw sounded angry, aggressive.  Noise is power, at least it is if you have a chainsaw in your hands.

In my childhood Chippy Ager and Bill Morris used to come and “brush” the churchyard grass when it reached a certain height.  They came in the evening after a day’s work, each with a sickle and a sharpening stone.  They worked with a gentle, rhythmic swing.  Noiseless, unhurried. Every now and then they paused.  The sound of the sharpening stone carried on the evening air.

One of our 21^st century drivers seems to be, “Hurry up! Get things done!  Move on!”  And how does it leave us feeling? Stressed, anxious, and worn out.  Sometimes we just need to stop and breathe – literally.  To change the rhythm.  To change the pace.

Silently, quietly nature responds to its environment.  It takes its time. First the snowdrops, then the crocuses, the daffodils, the primroses, the hyacinths and the bluebells.  Next door the turf will settle and become a lawn.  And if no-one tends it, the brambles, the buddleia and the blackbirds will be back.  “To everything there is a season….” 

Chris Dawson